Waiting for My Cats to Die
A Morbid Memoir
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
When Stacy Horn--single, deeply addicted to television, and hopelessly attached to two diabetic cats--turned forty, she free-falled into a mid-life crisis. Waiting for My Cats to Die is a passionately and profoundly honest look at what happens the moment you realize--beyond a shadow of a doubt--that some day the credits will roll on your life. There are all those things you haven't done yet. There are all those things you have and wish you hadn't. In the battle against time, a frontal attack is the best strategy. Horn explores abandoned cemeteries and descends into crypts. She researches long-lost relatives, interviews the elderly, and learns all she can about the ghost haunting her apartment. No sign indicating the downward pull of things goes unnoticed. And yet life, with so much to celebrate, is irresistible. Here is a wonderful, quirky, refreshing memoir of hilarity and heartache: life at the mid-point of life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Horn, a cyber-pioneer who launched Echo, a successful Gotham-based online community in the early '90s (and documented it in 1997's Cyberville), assembles haphazard thoughts on her samba drumming career, her diabetic cats, death and the single life, in this morbid but engagingly quirky memoir. Although she has no reason to believe that her own mortality is imminent (she's in her early 40s), Horn dives into the subject with all the zeal of a Baptist preacher. She discusses it online with peers and on the phone with elderly people, analyzes her cats' reactions to aging, and even explores the mystery of a ghost who supposedly haunts her apartment. That zeal is what holds this otherwise confused approach to understanding midlife together. In some chapters, Horn discusses particular aspects of her life and their deeper meaning, from what she presents as her hopelessly pudgy stomach to the fate of her business. In other sections--the book's tightest--she interviews senior citizens in an attempt to prove that wisdom comes with old age. However, what she finds through many of her conversations is that those who've lived a great deal of life often have no special secrets or knowledge to impart. The polls she conducts among Net-savvy New Yorkers on Echo add to her research and demonstrate that she's not alone in wistfully envying a 24-year-old's body. Although this work lacks focus and a clear thesis, it's a remarkably candid account of one woman's acceptance of aging, piqued with heartening moments of exhilaration.
